THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 13 & 20, 2017
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sometimes while fully aware of it, dis-
cussing with us not only the mystery of
his visions but also the mystery of cog-
nition. I had seen him cast about in a
mind temporarily compromised by ill-
ness and catch only strange, dark, pelagic
creatures, unknown and fearsome to the
rest of us. In all that time, under all those
varied conditions, I had never known
him to lack for words. But now, for five
days, he held his silence. On the sixth,
he lurched back into sound, but not into
himself; there followed an awful night
of struggle and agitation. After that, aside
from a few scattered words, some mys-
tifying, some seemingly lucid---"Hi!";
"Machu Picchu"; "I'm dying"---my fa-
ther never spoke again.
Even so, for a while longer, he en-
dured---I mean his him-ness, his Isaac-
ness, that inexplicable, assertive bit of
self in each of us. A few days before his
death, having ignored every request made
of him by a constant stream of medical
professionals ("Mr. Schulz, can you wig-
gle your toes?" "Mr. Schulz, can you
squeeze my hand?"), my father chose to
respond to one final command: Mr.
Schulz, we learned, could still stick out
his tongue. His last voluntary move-
ment, which he retained almost until
the end, was the ability to kiss my mother.
Whenever she leaned in close to brush
his lips, he puckered up and returned
the same brief, adoring gesture that I
had seen all my days. In front of my sis-
ter and me, at least, it was my parents'
hello and goodbye, their "Sweet dreams"
and "I'm only teasing," their "I'm sorry"
and "You're beautiful" and "I love you"---
the basic punctuation mark of their com-
mon language, the sign and seal of fifty
years of happiness.
One night, while that essence still
persisted, we gathered around, my fa-
ther's loved ones, and filled his silence
with talk. I had always regarded my
family as close, so it was startling to re-
alize how much closer we could get,
how near we drew around his dying
flame.The room we were in was a cube
of white, lit up like the aisle of a gro-
cery store, yet in my memory that night
is as dark and vibrant as a Rembrandt
painting. We talked only of love; there
was nothing else to say. My father, mute
but alert, looked from one face to the
next as we spoke, eyes shining with
tears. I had always dreaded seeing him
cry, and rarely did, but for once I was
grateful. It told me what I needed to
know: for what may have been the last
time in his life, and perhaps the most
important, he understood.
All this makes dying sound meaning-
ful and sweet---and it is true that, if you
are lucky, there is a seam of sweetness
and meaning to be found within it, a vein
of silver in a dark cave a thousand feet
underground. Still, the cave is a cave. We
had by then spent two vertiginous, elon-
gated, atemporal weeks in the I.C.U. At
no point during that time did we have a
diagnosis, still less a prognosis. At every
point, we were besieged with new possi-
bilities, new tests, new doctors, new hopes,
new fears. Every night, we arrived home
exhausted, many hours past dark, and
talked through what had happened, as if
doing so might guide us through the fol-
lowing day. Then we'd wake up and re-
sume the routine of the parking garage
and the elevator and the twenty-four-
hour Au Bon Pain, only to discover that,
beyond those, there was no routine at all,
nothing to help us prepare or plan. It was
like trying to dress every morning for the
weather in a nation we'd never heard of.
Eventually, we decided that my fa-
ther would not recover, and so, instead
of continuing to try to stave o death,
we unbarred the door and began to wait.
To my surprise, I found it comforting
to be with him during that time, to sit
by his side and hold his hand and watch
his chest rise and fall with a familiar lit-
tle ri e of snore. It was not, as they say,
unbearably sad; on the contrary, it was
bearably sad---a tranquil, contemplative,
lapping kind of sorrow. I thought, as it
turns out mistakenly, that what I was
doing during those days was making my
peace with his death. I have learned since
then that even one's unresponsive and
dying father is, in some extremely sa-
lient way, still alive. And then, very early
one morning, he was not.
What I remember best from those
next hours is watching my mother cra-
dle the top of my father's head in her
hand. A wife holding her dead husband,
without trepidation, without denial, with-
out any possibility of being cared for in
return, just for the chance to be tender
toward him one last time: it was the pur-
est act of love I've ever seen. She looked
bereft, beautiful, unimaginably calm. He
did not yet look dead. He looked like
knew that no one could manage such a
serious disease burden forever. Yet the
sheer number of times my father had
courted death and then recovered had,
perversely, made him seem indomitable.
As a result, I was not overly alarmed
when my mother called one morning
toward the end of the summer to say
that my father had been hospitalized
with a bout of atrial fibrillation. Nor
was I surprised, when my partner and
I got to town that night, to learn that
his heart rhythm had stabilized. The
doctors were keeping him in the hos-
pital chiefly for observation, they told
us, and also because his white-blood-
cell count was mysteriously high. When
my father related the chain of events to
us---he had gone to a routine cardiol-
ogy appointment, only to be shunted
straight to the I.C.U.---he was jovial
and accurate and eminently himself. He
remained in good spirits the following
day, although he was extremely garru-
lous, not in his usual e usive way but
slightly manic, slightly o ---a conse-
quence, the doctors explained, of tox-
ins building up in his bloodstream from
temporary loss of kidney function. If it
didn't resolve on its own in a day or two,
they planned to give him a round of di-
alysis to clear it.
That was on a Wednesday. Over the
next two days, the garrulousness declined
into incoherence; then, on Saturday, my
father lapsed into unresponsiveness.
Somewhere below his silence lurked six
languages, the result of being born in
Tel Aviv to parents who had fled po-
groms in Poland, relocating at age seven
to Germany (an unusual reverse exodus
for a family of Jews in , precipitated
by limited travel options and violence
in what was then still Palestine), and ar-
riving in the United States, on a refu-
gee visa, at the age of twelve. English,
French, German, Polish, Yiddish, He-
brew: of these, my father acquired the
first one last, and spoke it with Naboko-
vian fluency and panache. He loved to
talk---I mean that he found just putting
sentences together tremendously fun, al-
though he also cherished conversation---
and he talked his way into, out of, and
through everything, including illness.
During the years of medical crises, I had
seen my father racked and raving with
fever. I had seen him in a dozen kinds
of pain. I had seen him hallucinating---